Basics

1) The interface:

The interface is very user friendly, the only thing that a new user to editing will notice is the 4 windows in the view. They each represent a view from a different angle. The 3D view gives the editor a view of how the level will look when run in Quake, obviously it is in a wire-frame form, but it is clear to see how this represents the view within the actual game.

 

2) The button bar:

Buttons from left to right.

  1. new
  2. open
  3. save
  1. cut
  2. copy
  3. paste
  1. new
  2. delete
  1. select
  2. move
  3. rotate
  4. scale
  5. eye move
  6. eye rotate - 3D view only.
  7. zoom
  1. Scope up
  2. Scope down

 

Most of these buttons are self explanitory, particularly to Windows users. Here are a list of the functions of the more editor-specific buttons, and how to use them in editing:

These are used to insert/delete objects. The new object menu can also be reached by clicking the right mouse button. This gives you the option to insert a new brush (in a variety of shapes), insert a brush from a file, or to insert an entity. Entities include lights, the player starting positions and weapons among other things. In fact, the best way to describe entities is "things." I urge the new user to play with the new brush options. Look around to see what you can do with this powerful editing feature.

The delete button deletes the currently selected brush.

Select mode is used simply to select brushes, you cannot alter any of the brush's properties size, rotation etc, in this mode. To select a brush simply click on it or inside it with the left mouse button, if you don't select the one you expected, click again until you do. This mode is useful for grouping brushes. Groups will be mentioned in more detail later.

Move mode is used to move a selected brush, left click and drag on any selected brush and you will be move the brush in the direction you are moving the mouse. note that you must check in all of the views that the brush is in the correct place.

Rotate mode is used to rotate selected brushes. You rotate the brush by laft clicking and dragging to the left or right. In each window you can only rotate a brush in one plain. This is hard to describe but easy to see visually.

Scale mode is used to resize, or scale, a selcted brush. To resize a brush: select it, then let click and drag the brush. You will find that by dragging upwards the brush will become longer, and by dragging to the left it will become wider. Obviously down and right produce opposite results. Note that the brush will be expanded symetrically so you will probably have to move the brush after resizing it, or, you could have brilliantly for-planned the brush placement and it will just snap perfectly into position. But, often that isn't the case. Well, not with me anyway ;)

Eye move. This is the mode that you use to look around your level, by clicking and dragging the left mouse button in a mny window will result in moving the point at which the windows are focused on.

Eye rotate. This is used to rotate the point of view that the 3D window has. This only affects the 3D window.

Scope up and scope down These are slightly more advanced features, but they are not very difficult to understand. In order to understand these, you must understand the concept of object oriented editing. Without being too technical, I shall try to explain the concept: Say you have a desk with some magazines on, inside a room, the desk with the magazines on will be grouped, simply as the desk. When you want to move the desk around the room, you don't want to move the desk, then each magazine individually, you simply pick up the desk and move it. But, you might want to rearrange the mags on the desk, in which case, you wouldn't be dealing with the desk as a whole again.

Now, you have to change this idea to fit in with QOOLE. If you group the stuff on the desk, then you can move it around, resize it etc. But if you want to move the stuff on the desk around, then how do you ungroup the desk without having to totally re-group them again? You click scope down, this will allow you to edit the individual objects on the desk, and then when you hit scope up you will be back to having the desk with stuff on it as one object. You can scope down more than once, in this case, once you had scoped down to the desk and individual objects, you could scope down once more on the desk its-self to, say, shorten the legs or something. It is helpful to think of this as a tree, with each group of objects being represented by another branch. As in the tree case, the very top most step would be the whole tree, the same is true in QOOLE: If you scope all the way to the top, you will be able to edit everything at once.

Possibly the best feature of QOOLE! :) Even if it doesn't really add anything specific to the functions of the editor, this can be used to give the user something to listen to for those long editing hours.

 

3) Other windows:

In the image of the editor at the top of this page you can see the object and texture windows. In order to create a level with textures on the walls you must download a texture WAD (often called a WAD2, for old DOOM editors out there!). To use this in QOOLE hit the merge button and navigate in the menu to your WAD, then hit OK. The images contained in the WAD will come up in the window to the right. When you select a brush the texture of that brush will come up in the object window.

5) Other required files:

You will need a WAD texture file (as mentioned above) the qoole page has a link to the wad's directory on CDROM.COM, I recommend downloading quakewad.zip (or quake101.zip -same thing) this has all the textures you will ever need plus more. Yes it is large, but hey, that's why you bought a PC with a huge hard-drive, you did buy a PC with a huge hard-drive didn't you ? ;)
You also need the compilation tools to convert your level to a format that Quake can understand. These files are QBSP.EXE, LIGHT.EXE and VIS.EXE, there is a link on the QOOLE page to the compilation tools directory on cdrom.com. Sorry, you must download these files, there are other advanced versions of these utilities available, but I suggest that you stick with the basics first and upgrade to more advanced utils when you are more confident with the process.

 

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